Michael Reeves on the difference between teaching and preaching

In preaching I seek to do something I don't do in teaching: in teaching I'm conveying information with the best clarity I can; in preaching I am heralding - I'm heralding Christ in such a way that the truths that I'm preaching might not only shape your mind and your convictions but also affect your heart - how you feel about things, what you desire, what you want. So I want who Christ is to affect you at a heart level so that your life changes...I want people to understand the text such that their minds are clearer but I want then for their hearts to change and primarily I want to see them come to love Christ and find a joy in him and love him, adore him more than they adore their sins - so that they're weaned off their sins towards Christ...Preaching changed at the reformation when the reformers were saying 'We're not just trying to change the behaviour of those we're preaching to, we want their very hearts to change so that they do not simply behave better but actually love Christ, love the Lord, and therefore their behaviour changes.'

(from the Equip podcast)

People are actually moved by good language

Marilynne Robinson on being asked about the language of public discourse (which could also be helpfully applied to preaching, methinks)

I find that people are actually moved by good language. I think that one of the things that is an affliction and has been kind of increasingly an affliction is that we condescend to one another. This has bothered me forever. When Abraham Lincoln - a virtually totally uneducated man - wanted to speak to people, he did it with a degree of refinement that is extraordinary by any standard because he had that kind of respect for the people he was speaking to...To whom are we condescending? How have we let ourselves have such negative assumptions about people in general?

(Balm in Gilead, p.186)

prayer in study

Ministers must pray much, if they would be successful...Some ministers of meaner gifts and [abilities] are more successful than some that are far above them in abilities; not because they preach better, so much as because they pray more. Many good sermons are lost for lack of much prayer in the study.

Robert Trail, quoted in Sinclair Ferguson's Some Pastors and Teachers p.188

Preaching is...

"the extraordinary moment when someone attempts to speak in good faith, about something that matters, to people who attempt to listen in good faith. The circumstance is moving in itself, since we poor mortals are so far enmenshed in our frauds and shenanigans, not to mention our self-deceptions, that a serious attempt at meaning, spoken and heard, is quite exceptional. It has a very special character...to speak in one's own person and voice to others who listen from the thick of their endlessly various situations, about what truly are or ought to be matters of life and death, this is a singular thing. For this we come to church.

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.146

Sermons turning to ash in the presence of Love

For Ames, writing sermons was a spiritual discipline that was unseated by an apophaticisim of sorts. The spiritual discipline fails in the face of actual Love. That's something all preachers know too; probably all pursuers of any spiritual discipline know - at least, we hope we'll come to know, if we persist long enough in the Christian life. We hope to know that the disciplines fail in the face of Love, that in Love's company we feel the poverty of our efforts, as Ames's sermons turn to ash in his mouth when Lila is there.

Lauren Winner, Thinking about preaching with Marilynne Robinson, in Balm in Gilead p.88

Learning from the preaching of Peter

Peter's foundational preaching in the earliest days of the church provides a model for preaching to every generation. It must be practiced in the power of the Holy Spirit, as the natural outflow of a life lived for and empowered by the presence of God, humbly submitted fully to him. It must be authentically proclaimed by one who has first personally come under the convicting power of God's truth and also responded in repentance and received God's forgiveness. And the message must always be Christ-centred, gospel focussed, rooted in Scripture, and relevantly applied to contemporary circumstances. The response to such preaching is in the hands of a sovereign God, and all the glory is his.

A Legacy of Preaching, Vol 1 (p.61f)